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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Researchers use one-of-a-kind expertise and capabilities to test fuels of tomorrow
At the Idaho National Laboratory Hot Fuel Examination Facility, containment box operator Jake Maupin moves a manipulator arm into position around a pencil-thin nuclear fuel rod. He is preparing for a procedure that he and his colleagues have practiced repeatedly in anticipation of this moment in the hot cell.
Kaushik Banerjee, William R. Martin
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 174 | Number 1 | May 2013 | Pages 30-45
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE11-94
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Monte Carlo point detector and surface crossing flux tallies are two widely used tallies, but they suffer from an unbounded variance. As a result, the central limit theorem cannot be used for these tallies to estimate confidence intervals. By construction, kernel density estimator (KDE) tallies can be directly used to estimate flux at a point, but the variance of this point estimate does not converge as 1/N, which is not unexpected for a point quantity. However, an improved approach is to modify both point detector and surface crossing flux tallies directly by using KDE within a variance reduction approach and taking advantage of the fact that KDE estimates the underlying probability density function. This methodology is illustrated by several numerical examples and shows numerically that both the surface crossing tally and the point detector tally converge as 1/N (in variance), and both are asymptotically unbiased.